Coaching is everywhere; you can hire a coach to help you through nearly every life stage and quandary. You can pipe Peloton coaches into earbuds to get you prepped to run a marathon, hire a career coach as you embark on a job search, or work with a health and wellness coach to interrogate your lifestyle and work toward better overall health. Our brand of coaching is focused on developing the emotional intelligence, talent, and capacity of leaders in the social impact space. We are executive leadership coaches, and if you lead a team, chances are you should probably hire us to support your development toward deeply resonant, heart-centered leadership that centers human connection as a key lever to moving critical change work forward.
The Imperative for Effective Leaders: Know Yourself
For starters, if you’re leading a team right now, you’re likely engaged in today’s brand of non-stop daily grind. Leading teams is hard work, maybe harder than it has ever been before. Movement leaders, in particular, are faced with multi-dimensional challenges every day, both internally and externally. These challenges include managing competing priorities, the 24 hour news cycle, the COVID-19 pandemic, the continual harm of systemic racism, our shifting workplace dynamics, generational misalignment, managing the demands of building healthy internal cultures with the organization’s stated mission, unclear accountability structures, inability to communicate openly and share clear feedback for growth, and the list goes on.
You likely don’t spend a ton of time stepping outside of yourself to think about who you are and how you show up to lead. It might feel impossible to even consider engaging in that level of self-reflection. But the truth is that exploring your leadership through coaching so often helps you extinguish the fires, both in your mind and across your team, with more ease and efficiency. Coaching exercises your self-awareness muscles. It provides space to explore who you are, to define what matters to you, and to interrogate how and why you act and react. Through coaching, you can step outside of all that is urgent and important to find the space to connect to your own purpose, mission, and driving values. You need a coach because sharpening the clarity with which you see yourself can pave the way for you to lead from a deeply grounded place.
Your Team is a Work in Progress
Is your style of leadership helping to accelerate your team’s work, or is it blocking their progress? Are you an enabler or an enforcer? Do you create opportunities to gather that critical feedback on your leadership? (If not, we’ve got you covered.)
Your team likely struggles when you are down, and it likely flies high when you are at your best. That’s because most of our work happens in the interpersonal spaces we create. Our collective histories and futures are told through our relationships, and nowhere is this more apparent than in teams working to rewrite our systems’ scripts. Managing the constant demands and continuous change coming our way requires a model for leadership that is grounded in self awareness, emotional intelligence, and deep connectivity.
Through coaching, you’ll explore the five elements of Emotional Intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social awareness. You’ll explore the roles you play in the relationships that drive your work. You’ll identify the connections that feel strong, and build skills to address ruptures when they happen. Coaching paves the way to better communication grounded in continuous feedback that’s not scary. Coaching helps you understand what your team needs from you, and provides space to explore those needs as you internalize them. You need a coach because building your capacity to embody emotional intelligence, and specifically to use the information you collect about your team’s emotional wellness, can pave the way for you to lead a team that feels anchored and stable.
Systems That Know How to Learn and Grow
In order for our society to achieve the social changes we seek, and the systemic redesign required, we need deeply resonant leaders. Your team is a living, breathing, ever-changing organism; your team is its own micro-system functioning inside what is likely a web of interdependent systems. Each of the individuals who make up your team’s system has their own growth trajectory and needs different things to thrive. But your team’s system, no matter where it falls on the scales of health and effectiveness, needs leaders who can tend to its members and multiple systems that function in its orbit.
Our collective systems need us all to prioritize relationships and empathy, to clarify accountabilities, to set high expectations, to motivate and inspire, and to model introspection and the delivery and receipt of feedback. Our systems need to understand how values are operationalized and embedded into the culture. All of these are leadership skills developed over time, one leader at a time, with impacts so far beyond merely one team at one organization.
Read our clients’ reflections on their 1:1 coaching experiences with us. Reach out to learn more, and to find out how to jump into coaching with us.